NO-GO IPs for MU*
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@GangOfDolls said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:
White Wolf when it was White Wolf loved to go after people for sharing their IP online. But they seemed to leave games online alone, even if they were sharing the material at the same time. Does anyone understand the difference in their reasoning?
Many original White Wolf staffers were Mushers.
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@GangOfDolls
There's also a point of allowance. WW's setting is MADE for the whole 'derivative' thing, as it's an RPG. Settings that are only works of fiction are not. They also have only primarily, recently, went after people posting/using the actual IP (like the subnet posting entire swathes of material on a website, or the Bloodlines remake Project Vaulderie) and infringing on that, which they HAVE to defend at that point, lest they have no leg to stand on when @Thenomain writes 'Planet of Cloudy Grayness'. -
I do laugh at the people who are like "YOU MAY NOT CREATE FANWORKS OR GAMES BASED OFF MY IP" because, when you go diving, you tend to find that they wrote fanfiction in the beginning and, better yet, sometimes still do.
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Just keep it relatively private-ish.
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@Gilette said in NO-GO IPs for MU*:
I do laugh at the people who are like "YOU MAY NOT CREATE FANWORKS OR GAMES BASED OFF MY IP" because, when you go diving, you tend to find that they wrote fanfiction in the beginning and, better yet, sometimes still do.
What they can't do is allow it. They just can't. It's sort of a wink-wink thing, but under no circumstances can they just say "sure, make a game out of my property" without it weakening their copyright.
It doesn't mean they'll sue free games based on their stuff, that's basically unheard of. They can't officially condone it but it's as it does help the property to have word of mouth constantly generated by players, and it brings their fanbases together, I've never really heard of an IP owner going after MU*.
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Doesn't that Nymeria chick flip the fuck out if people make Game of Thrones MUs and have them shut down?
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@Sonder She tries. I don't know if she succeeds. She is really expert at flipping her shit like whoa, though.
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@Sonder She actually never came after Steel & Stone, though we always expected her to.
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@Roz I thought she came after S&S right at the beginning when Elf was at the helm
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
The fact that we have permission from GRRM to run our own game does not mean that we have any right to shut down games who wrongfully use his IP, nor have we ever attempted to. The only one who can do that is GRRM and he does not want to spend his time chasing down "fans" who disregard the fact that he has said that he does not want games run without his permission.
Likely this confusion over whether we have tried to shut down any other ASoIaF/GoT games arises from the fact that we do not allow any discussion of such games on our game, any more than we allow discussion of or links to fan fiction.
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@Ghost I'll ask him next time he's online and I think of it. I do have memory of hearing when I was on staff there that it was expected, but hadn't happened.
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I can't shake the feeling that BoD staff has entered the thread.
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@Sonder I worked with some people on a Game of Thrones MUX a few years back and they were contacted by staff at BoD. They were actually quite polite and just discussed diluting the player base for GoT RP and asked about bringing our ideas over to their game. When staff a the game I was working on declined they just said "Okay, good luck!" and that was it. It was all very pleasant. I can't speak for other people's experience but that was the experience we had.
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@ZombieGenesis All I can say is that neither myself nor Nymeria have ever approached anyone working on another ASoIaF/GoT game. I cannot say with 100% certainty that some of our staff might not have done so, but if so it was done without our knowledge or approval. I must admit to being very dubious, especially given the claim that the staffer invited the other game to bring their ideas over to our game, as all of our staff knows that we would never consider such a scenario. We're rather set in our ways and have always had a very specific vision for our game.
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I know there was contact by Siembieda towards various Palladium games in the past, anything that automated anything and reduced the need for the game books was pretty much a no go back in the mid 90's. I've seen games get away with it more recently though so it might be something he doesn't consider a threat now or simply so niche as to not be a concern to him anymore.
I also recall a game having to use pure OGL d20 for a 3.0 D&D game due to cease and desist type stuff but I wasn't staff there so don't know if that was just a precautionary choice or something that they were told they had to do.
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@Ghost Okay officially double-checked and I was correct, she didn't pay S&S a visit (unless it was after both Elf and myself were gone from the game).
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@Roz There goes the record straight, then. I could a swore I heard something about it during the Elf reign, but I didn't hear it from Elf. The old sayings about rumors stand true.
Game on.
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Nymeria did throw thinly-veiled shade at S&S and some other GoT MU*s on Second Life/her own blog/probably other platforms. Thinly-veiled shade from Nymeria is not exactly a thing I'd view as a deterrent, though (heck, depending on how unhinged it is, it's a weird kind of endorsement of any alternative).
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Of course Nymeria plays Second Life. This should not have surprised me.
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Palladium Games and particularly Kevin Simbieda used to have a reputation for being pretty unfriendly to derivative uses of their work but I don't know that MU*'s ever really came up on their radar/concerned them. After all there were several Rifts MUSHes a bit back and while I don't know, I've never heard in my various internet trawlings of them being told to shut down.
